Posted
by
Hemos
on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:59AM
from the choke-choke-death-death dept.

EnlightenmentFan writes "Apple plans to stop production in June of the iMac with flat-panel 17-inch display, according to this article at Asian tech-news site Digitimes. As with the now-history 15" flat-panel iMac, sales started strong but stalled once the early-adopter crowd had bought in. Probably-not-unrelated story (also posted today): Chungwha Picture Tubes is boosting the price of its 17-inch LCD monitor panels."

It was silent because it lacked proper heat control methods. This is why a number of them had issues with overheating when used in an environment where several of them were needed in close quarters. I'm remembering singed plastic, and the necessity of cooled cabinets for large banks of them.

If I put a fan-less heatsink on my Athlon, removed the case fans, and disabled the power supply fan, it'd run silent, too. Of course, I'd probably have a dysfunctional machine on my hands quite quickly.:p

Apple are quite a big company, but they are not THAT big - perhaps they should learn from this and the iCube, and plan a little more carefully before they launch certain products?

This won't happen, because "Apple's market research" can be restated as "Steve's design sense", which, in case you haven't noticed, is a measure of how symmetrical something is.

Apple seems to always make marketing blunders when radial symmetry -- the highest order of Steve's Design Sense -- is involved in the design. Examples: the Cube, the round mouse, the new iMac. Steve is obviously brilliant, but sometimes he takes his particular taste a little too far.

Err. I've heard of several people whose cubes went into meltdown. It's not even multiple degrees of separation where it's such and such a figurative person who I've never heard of other than to hear that their cube melted. At most, this is 3 degrees of separation. If it's "rare", then I must know quite a few of the "few".

As for my Athlon melting if I didn't provide it with proper cooling, I was merely saying that I could run my Athlon silently too if I followed the path that Apple went with the cube. It's just not smart to remove all cooling, and the G4 Cube was not a very triumphant success in this area. As for "banks", I meant anything over 3 of them in close proximity, and once again--it wasn't my personal experience, as I never purchased a cube. Merely something I heard from someone whose employer had.

As for the "feature" comment, it's only a feature if it works reliably. If the computer likes to go into meltdown at an oddly high rate, then it's not a feature.

There are athlons that run silently using a combination of a special power supply, quiet HDD, a heatsink with no moving parts, and an aluminum case, THOSE have the "feature". The cube did not.